Art Noticeboard: Harland Miller: York, So Good They Named It Once

Sunday 23 February 2020

Harland Miller: York, So Good They Named It Once - York Art Gallery (until 31 May 2020)

Harland Miller, Incurable Romantic Seeks Dirty Filthy Whore, 2019 (detail)

Harland Miller: York, So Good They Named It Once is at York Art Gallery until 31 May 2020
Harland Miller's paintings are refreshingly pleasurable and intelligent: they combine painterly sensuousness with literary wit.
The "Penguin Book Covers" and the "Pelican Bad Weather Paintings" take as their template the classic Penguin and Pelican book cover designs of the 1950s and 60s - orange cut through with white and blue cut with white, respectively. As Catherine Ince records, Miller recognized a visual affinity between this design format and Mark Rothko's Abstract Expressionist canvases - but with "graphic furniture"; this seemed especially so in the case of a paperback book that was battered, creased, foxed". (Bracewell (2019) p87)
The paintings - measuring around 7' x 5' - while instantly recognisable as representations of book covers are rendered as colour field paintings rich with washes of colour, smears, stains and dribbles of paint. Into these Miller has inserted witty, invented book titles: Death: What's In It For Me?, Whitby: The Self Catering Years, Narcissist Seeks Similar...
These are beautiful paintings that make you laugh. Mark Rothko meets Ed Ruscha.
This is Yorkshire-born Miller's largest solo exhibition, to date (a mid-career retrospective) and it is a joy to see it in York Art Gallery.
Further Reading
Bracewell, M. et al (2019) In Shadows I Boogie: Harland Miller, London: Phaidon
Burn, G., Cocker, J. and Miller, H. (2007) "Working Titles", The Guardian, 5 May 2007
Draper, J. (2016) "Harland Miller: 'Brevity is no strength of mine'", Studio International, 19 June 2016